Joomla

If both mod_rewrite and 301’s are out in full force the home page is not going to be identifiable by a Server query_string containing “frontpage.” To determine if the current code is on the home page:

$s = filter_var($_REQUEST['QUERY_STRING'], FILTER_SANITIZE_SPECIAL_CHARS);
if (empty($s)) {

//you’re on the home page

}

More info for animal shelters needing web sites or web marketing……..

… I’ve been building/rebuilding web sites for animal rescue groups. It’s my way of giving as I don’t deal with the shelter that well. I do two basic things: 1) build the site, 2) market the organization on the web.

The web sites I build are usually built on free software called Joomla. Instead of upload stories or changing HTML directly you would login to the administrator and publish your stories from there. If I do help out we don’t have to use that system, but I do recommend it because 1) multiple people can update the site; 2) you can easily grab email addresses from people interested in your org; 3) we can often add new features really fast. For instance I can add an online store in an hour or two; it uses a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) editor so you don’t need to know any html — really a whole lot more.

Here are all the add ons to the base product:
http://extensions.joomla.org/

The main issue, though, is marketing. I assume that you want your web site to be found when someone types in
nh shelter
dogs for adoption
Or the like.
The business of making that happen is called SEO or search engine optimization. SEO used to be mechanical and very easy to do. Now the mechanical part is just the pre-requisite to the real work of web marketing. It’s very labor intensive (takes a lot of time, though the tasks themselves are not that hard).

Successful SEO is mostly about writing, writing, writing. There are tons of ways to get the word out about your web site, some of them really help you in the search engines, some less so.

I’ll help with either of these, my standing offer is here

A few things you might want to know about me:

I’m a low stress person, I don’t want to be a CARRIER either!

I’m just here to help, if this causes problems in the org don’t ever feel like you owe me anything, it’s your organization

Really good SEO skills are marketable. If you want training to market arnne it’s a great opportunity to learn for the doggies and then use it in your career.

I’m available when you need me, please don’t stress on my account.

Best,
Caroline

Joomla 1.5.0 Beta Installation: Two Tricks

1. Do NOT enter FTP information during the installation. Whatever bad falls out of that will be dealt with later. Or, enter it but if you’re site’s slowed to nothing you’ll have to find the “off” switch

2. During database creation just go and create the database and assign a user to it first, then fill in the info on the database installation settings page. It’ll save you the hassle of finding out that you can’t programmatically create a database.

Did I say two? Here’s a third.

Get the Joomla 1.5 beta here

But then upgrade from the Joomla 1.5 nightly build here

Before debugging anything always get the latest build.

The Joomla You Are Not Authorized to View This Resource error has many causes. You will not find this one in any standard Joomla forum.

I added a titletag column to the jos_content table. I used it in components/com_content/content.php to set a custom title tag per content item.

$query = “SELECT a.id, a.title, a.title_alias, a.titletag, a.introtext, a.sectionid, a.state, a.catid, a.created, a.created_by, a.created_by_alias, a.modified, a.modified_by,” . “n a.checked_out, a.checked_out_time, a.publish_up, a.publish_down, a.images, a.urls, a.ordering, a.metakey, a.metadesc, a.access, a.hits,” . “n CHAR_LENGTH( a.fulltext ) AS readmore, u.name AS author, u.usertype, s.name AS section, cc.name AS category, g.name AS groups” . $voting['select'] . “n FROM #__content AS a” . “n INNER JOIN #__content_frontpage AS f ON f.content_id = a.id” . “n INNER JOIN #__categories AS cc ON cc.id = a.catid” . “n INNER JOIN #__sections AS s ON s.id = a.sectionid” . “n LEFT JOIN #__users AS u ON u.id = a.created_by” . “n LEFT JOIN #__groups AS g ON a.access = g.id” . $voting['join'] . $where . “n ORDER BY $order_pri $order_sec” ;

$database->setQuery( $query, $limitstart, $limit );

$rows = $database->loadObjectList();

// Dynamic Page Title

// ctb 9/26/06 added meta key words to title

$titletag=$rows[0]->titletag;

if (strlen($titletag)< =0) {$titletag=$rows[0]->metakey;

Then I copied content.php to a site that did not have the $titletag hack. The result was a home page (com_frontpage) that displayed “You are not authorized to view this item” for each of the home page items.

 In administrator/components/com_virtuemart/html/shop.product_details.php, add the category name to the page title    $mainframe->setPageTitle( html_entity_decode( substr($category_name.” “.$product_name, 0, 60 ) ));

In order to set keyword-rich title tags on a VirtueMart category listing page:

In administrator/components/com_virtuemart/html/shop.index_sdm.php (your mileage may vary on file name), add and initialize a $title variable in the top:

$title=”";

After setting the category name, append the category to the title:

$catname = shopMakeHtmlSafe($db->f(”category_name”)); $title .=$catname.”,”;
This presumes your shop.index page calls

$mainframe->setPageTitle($title);

Joomla’s 404SEF component can be tricky if you want to use directory names instead of file extensions, aka

http://www.bombshelters.com/Education/Biological-Bioterror-Weapons-Effects

not

http://www.bombshelters.com/Education/Biological-Bioterror-Weapons-Effects.html

First, lowercase is on by default. Second, default file extension of .html hurls your pages into deep space.

To hae both, go to 404 config, set All Lowercase to No, set File Suffix to a blank textbox.

If you’ve installed 404SEF and gotten it to work you might find that it still seems to mess up sometimes. You assign a module to a page but that page is not always associated with that menu item. The module therefore doesn’t show up.
Actually it’s Joomla that’s jumping all over the place, 404SEF is just going along for the ride.
Let’s go through everything required to make 404SEF work, including when Joomla keeps renaming pages.

1. Install 404SEF as a component
2. modify .htaccess as per below
3. Turn on SEO in Global Configuration
4. Turn on 404SEF in 404SEF Configuration
5. If a module shows up sometimes but not others, and it appears that 404SEF is renaming a page every time it’s loaded, make that page static using the Content/Static Content Manager (create new static content and delete old dynamic content).

## Can be commented out if causes errors, see notes above.
# Options FollowSymLinks
#
# mod_rewrite in use
RewriteEngine On
# Uncomment following line if your webserver’s URL
# is not directly related to physical file paths.
# Update Your Joomla/MamboDirectory (just / for root)
# RewriteBase /
########## Begin Standard SEF Section
## ALL (RewriteCond) lines in this section are only required if you actually
## have directories named ‘content’ or ‘component’ on your server
## If you do not have directories with these names, comment them out.
#
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(/component/option,com) [NC,OR] ##optional - see notes##
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} (/|\.htm|\.php|\.html|/[^.]*)$ [NC]
#RewriteRule ^(content/|component/) index.php
#
########## End Standard SEF Section
########## Begin 3rd Party or Core SEF Section
#
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(/component/option,com) [NC,OR] ##optional - see notes##
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} (/|\.htm|\.php|\.html|/[^.]*)$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule (.*) index.php
#
########## End 3rd Party or Core SEF Section